Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players is a Berkeley-based company of theater artists. It produces five to six plays each season, with an overarching commitment to creating socially relevant work at affordable prices. Its shows reach approximately 25,000 people each year. In addition, Shotgun Players makes its stage and studios available for other performing arts groups at affordable rental rates. Support for Shotgun Players advances the Performing Arts Program’s Communities strategy.

Shotgun Players is a Berkeley-based company of theater artists committed to creating socially relevant work at affordable prices, whose performances reach more than 25,000 people each year. It produces six plays per season, including at least one new work; each play is complemented by lobby and exterior murals created in partnership with local artists and youth organizations. Shotgun Players further demonstrates its commitment to artists and its local community through its Fair Wage Fund, which has raised the wages for all of its participating artists and technicians, and by providing pay-what-you-can tickets and youth and artist discounts for all productions.

Over the past seventeen years, The Shotgun Players has grown from an ensemble of four actors and an artistic director to a company with 20 twenty artists producing three classic and two new plays each season for 14,000 patrons at their 150 seat theater in South Berkeley and in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park. Shotgun stands out among theater companies in the Bay Area for their critically acclaimed new plays and for cultivating relationships with the nation’s most talented young playwrights including 2007 Pulitzer prize finalist Eisa Davis and 2007 Obie winner Adam Bock, and Mark Jackson (a 2003 Hewlett fellow at the Djerassi Residents Artist Program). In 2009 Shotgun will produce a new play by Marcus Gardley about the women who worked the Richmond California shipyards in WWII in collaboration with Hewlett grantee the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. Supported by the Hewlett Foundation since 2004, Shotgun continues to match its artistic ambition with intelligently planned, and even audacious, organizational development. In 2007 Shotgun became the nation’s first 100% solar powered theater in part due to funds provided by Hewlett to install solar panels on the roof of its home theater, the Ashby Stage. As it approaches its 20th anniversary Shotgun, with a $500,000 annual budget, is emerging as a mid-size theater at a time and in a region that, as an Irvine Foundation study on the arts in California found "mid size organizations may suffer the most as talent becomes more expensive and funding more competitive." Increased support for Shotgun will enable the organization to increase support for artists, ramp up individual and corporate funding and deepen connections with neighbors in South Berkeley in order to make good on a mission to serve the community in which they work and create. (Renewal $150,000/3 years)